An amazing book which will create the most tremendous controversy the world of Science has known for hundreds of years. Ben Hecht says in the Chicago Daily News: "For every five people who read this book four will go insane.... I rush to surrender my homage. Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he has delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world." "'The Book of the Damned' makes fascinating reading. No imaginative fiction writer could conjure up stranger visions than Mr. Fort creates in his collection of mysterious happenings all over the world." --The New York Tribune.

But that all that we call "being" is motion: and that all motion is the expression, not of equilibrium, but of equilibrating, or of equilibrium unattained: that life-motions are expressions of equilibrium unattained: that all thought relates to the unattained: that to have what is called being in our quasi-state, is not to be in the positive sense, or is to be intermediate to Equilibrium and Inequilibrium.

So then:

That all phenomena in our intermediate state, or quasi-state, represent this one attempt to organize, stabilize, harmonize, individualize--or to positivize, or to become real:

That only to have seeming is to express failure or intermediateness to final failure and final success;

That every attempt--that is observable--is defeated by Continuity, or by outside forces--or by the excluded that are continuous with the included:

That our whole "existence" is an attempt by the relative to be the absolute, or by the local to be the universal.